At the time of my last post, I was 8 days deep into the first of two, twenty-one day intensified chemo cycles. Smoked ‘em, what’s next, I asked with impunity. How about seventeen days of Involved-Field Radiation “Therapy”. For the uninitiated, you lie on a table and get zapped by imaginary, painless beams of destruction for 3 seconds at a time which, in increasing order of importance, cause a gnarly latent sunburn, destroy hair follicles, kill regular cells that regenerate, and kill cancer cells that hopefully don’t — collectively, 30.6 grays of radiation, a lethal amount if delivered in one shot, hoorah. K, did that, what now? Now, it has been 148 days since my last chemo infusion, 88 days since my last exposure to radiation, and, in 11 days, I will have another PET scan to determine whether our medical weaponry impaled the cave-dwelling beast whose name we dare not utter into submission beyond repair.
But who’s counting?
I am. And, if you’ve been hashtag capital “B” Blessed with a life-threatening illness (or if you’re close to someone who has been), you are too. Counting. Always counting. Weeks. Days. Hours. Infusions. Scans. Days until next scan, days since last scan, days left until you can eat pizza and sugar again without gut twittering remorse. Days grass has been green and pollen has been visibly surfing air waves. Counting the days since last you couldn’t count more than a couple of breaths before you coughed.
Measuring the distance between you and your illness as if they were two separate things. But this is a futile enterprise. Doing so is like driving in the dead of dawn, eyes locked in the rearview mirror on the snoring sign with your hometown’s name on it, gradually overflowing with pangs of victory as it becomes tiny and dim in the mirror and you get further away, and just as you put pressure on the gas and fist pump the air to celebrate your narrow escape, your fat schnoz — dank and swollen from all that Northeastern pollen and greenery — whapow’s into the steering wheel because that goddamned sign from which you were running has somehow awoken and found its way in FRONT of your Prius, which now has yet ANOTHER dent because of this universal law called inertia and another universal theory not yet risen to the bar of scientific law that Toyota Priuses exert a gravitational force on denting projectiles. I suspect in this case science will soon catch up with collective wisdom on these two facts: 1. the Prius model is predisposed to getting fucked up, and 2. you cannot outrun your own body.
You, so clever to think you could sneak past your own self, ran smack dab whapow back into it. Nice try.
Alas, that’s what the game of cancer feels like. To paraphrase Lewis Carroll, it’s like running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. This, truly, is slow country. Reminds me of working in TV.
It’s the same feeling I had when I was four years old and my dad gave me a kite string in the front yard and told me to run as fast as I could. I was industrious; I obliged. Just as I got up to a full sprint, I turned and ran forehead first into a metal lamppost. Duuuungggg. It rang like a Mike Tyson boxing bell. I got creamed. I was down with a capital “D.”
When you catch cancah, you board a never-ending elliptical of counting, hoping, worrying, mitigating, and distracting until you whapow into one of many hidden lampposts. This provokes unadulterated textbook anxiety of the most diabolical sort. And it is inescapable.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering from whereth cometh this anxiety, my hope being of course that if I were to get a lock on its origin I could banish it back there. Many assume that it is born from a fear of death.
A fair deduction.
However.
I don’t know about you, but dying isn’t what I’m afraid of. It’s dying with a long list of important shit left tah-do.
And while I am choosing not to discuss it in this public forum, one of the silver linings of this illness has been that it’s resulted in some important additions to my to-do-before-I-croak list, one of which I’ve begun learning how to do in a classroom setting. So, each time a scan approaches or I have a new bizarre symptom that results in a surprise MRI on a Friday to rule out a spinal tumor (for example), I’m wondering — deeply, maddeningly, desperately — wondering if I’m going to be able to launch that new item on the to-do list or if I’m going to whapow into another lamppost. What does the lamppost look like? It ain’t an LED beacon, I can tell you that. On the tame side of the spectrum, it is lung toxicity, a weakened immune system, and constantly looking over my shoulder for “lobular masses.” On the harsher side: different chemo, immunotherapy, bone-marrow transplant, question mark, question mark, question mark — all of which either delay me engaging in a life and a career where I can actually pay for things and make myself proud and feel like a man or, worse, end with me dead with a bunch of flaked appointments on my google calendar and people saying, Are we supposed to bring a card to a funeral? Shit, I didn’t bring a card, did you? Can I co-sign it?
Don’t bring a card. Never bring a card. Send a card. Bring words from your guts that you always wanted to say and say them standing up.
And don’t worry, you won’t be at my funeral. Not anytime soon anyways.
For one, my lack of engagement with social media will likely prevent most of you from even knowing I was still alive. I’ll be like that click-bait headline way at the bottom of an unrelated article, “10 Celebrities You Thought Were Dead But Actually Were Alive But Wait They Just Died Two Months Ago. (Is Rick Moranis still Alive Question Mark)”
And for two, physically, I’m great.
If you’ve read this far, that’s probably what bringeth you here, right? How is that ole sumbitch doin’?
The Escalated BEACOPP chemo regimen was a walk in the park. The most challenging aspect was the borderline psychosis that comes from that second P, which stands for Prednisone, and the hidden W which stands for Winter. 75 mg of a daily corticosteroid with a foot of snow outside and the sun setting at 4:30PM will convince you to run a marathon of two-step wind-sprints in your brother’s kitchen between the oven and the refrigerator until it wears off, at which point you’ll parkour kick-jump off the refrigerator and dive head first into the open oven set to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. (Who knew that word had 2 H’s?). To put it another way, if you haven’t gargled Prednisone in December in Upstate NY lacking surety of your future existence, dare I say, you haven’t lived, man. You know nothing of Anxiety with a capital “My Face Is On Fyre and My Mediport is Migrating into my Right Ventricle and Where’d All My Savings Go.”
Hoorah.
Did the chemo and the Prednisone and the radiation suck? I wouldn’t opt into them on a partly cloudy free Saturday, but they weren’t that bad. They make you feel like luke-warm garbage, you have trouble shitting, you lose all your hair and your appetite, and you forget people’s names sometimes. Boo-fucking-hoo. You’re no hero. A note to cancer patients everywhere, with the exception of a very small number of you, you did not kick cancer’s ass. Your nurses mostly did. They’re the real heroes. You put one foot on their shoulders and the other on decades of human-and-animal killing scientific research, you worried a lot, you did some research by typing words into a magical machine invented by other people, powered by an energy grid built by other people, you showed up for your appointments, and you took your medicine. Quit dancing in the end zone. Other people carried you here.
And besides, it’s filled with lampposts.
The short answer to your question is that this sumbitch is great. Better than I’ve ever been in my life. Treatment is donezo. Hair and strength are returning. I’m filling my days with cleaning homes and taking classes and reading and writing so I don’t have to think about that big PET scan in a couple of weeks, the one where you get a gold star, a pat on the back, and a follow-up appointment to have another one in a few months.
Sure, I ran into a few lampposts after treatment ended. My below-average immune system means I catch every bug that goes around, including one whose symptoms included spontaneous projectile puking and shitting for two days, hoorah. I had to have an MRI on my thoracic spine because I was having neuropathy around my chest. Neuropathy around the chest, you say? Imagine wearing an invisible thermonuclear tube top that provides constant alternating freezing cold, numbness, sunburn, and bee sting sensations. That went away, but then I caught a chest virus and couldn’t breathe for two weeks. Had another scan to make sure I didn’t have a blood clot in my chest, which came back negative, but showed that I have stenosis (constricting) in a giant vein below my clavicle.
Lampposts, brah.
But like I said, best I’ve ever been. And that is not millennial-fluent hyperbolic sarcasm. That is the truest thing I have ever written. Physically, I feel fantastic. Mentally, I feel nervous and enthusiastic and confident and calm and joyful and in hilarious insightful conversation with a formerly hibernating zone of my own brain. In short, I feel Alive with a capital “Not Going to Die, Got Shit Tah-DO.”
Oh, that constriction in my subclavian vein? The body is cool; without me asking or thanking, it built up collateral veins to redirect blood traffic. Hemodynamics. Problem solved.
That’s the thing about hitting the lamppost when I was a kid. I got up. I went around it. And I kept running. Take it from me: if you’re post cancer treatment and you whapow into a lamppost, mark it on a map, run elsewhere, and stay frosty. You’re in lamppost country now.
I still run sometimes. In fact, I’m going to press post and go for a run right now. Because I can.
Hoo-rah? Me-rah.